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Mar 2020
11:29am, 4 Mar 2020
12,055 posts
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Cerrertonia
Anglo-Saxon was closer to Latin in that regard. Inflections rather than word order were used to indicate subject, object etc. Somewhere along the road to Middle English, we lost most of those inflections.
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Mar 2020
12:01pm, 4 Mar 2020
47,941 posts
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GlennR
Anyone who's had the misfortune to read Virgil in the original will know that Latin can stand any amount of mangling of the word order. One reason why gits like Milton commit atrocities with English word order is that they saw it done in Latin and thought they could do the same. As I wrote, gits.
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Mar 2020
12:23pm, 4 Mar 2020
6,019 posts
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Northern Exile
Nice one Glenn. Where's the "Like" button gone?
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Mar 2020
1:54am, 5 Mar 2020
18,906 posts
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ChrisHB
Also like Glenn's thought on Virgil.
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Mar 2020
6:38am, 5 Mar 2020
45,716 posts
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Diogenes
Do you think inflexion as emphasis was superseded by word order as written English became more widespread? Does word order master so much in speech?
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Mar 2020
8:29am, 5 Mar 2020
47,973 posts
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GlennR
It was more as English dropped all the inflexive bells and whistles, then order became crucial. The same is true of all the Romance language as they moved away from their particular Latin dialects.
The languages I’m curious about, but am utterly unqualified to comment on, are those like Icelandic and Lithuanian, which retain all of their earlier inflexions.
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Mar 2020
9:14am, 5 Mar 2020
6,025 posts
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Northern Exile
I was just chatting to a fluent German speaker (fluent in several other languages too) and she says that in modern German word order is really not critical and it's debatable as to whether you can add more emphasis by (say) leaving the verb to the end of the sentence, so I wind back on my earlier statement. I'm clearly not qualified to comment at all, I probably will though 
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Mar 2020
9:30am, 5 Mar 2020
33,810 posts
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LindsD
I would agree with your interlocutor, NE. German has enough inflection to make meaning clear without needing word order, mostly. However, there are certainly word order *rules* in German that still need to be observed.
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Mar 2020
9:31am, 5 Mar 2020
6,026 posts
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Northern Exile
I was hoping you'd chime in Linds
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Mar 2020
9:32am, 5 Mar 2020
33,811 posts
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LindsD
I was being polite and respectful earlier. Plus I don't like conflict
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